Aren't black people on the whole the
best athletes in the world? They clearly dominate so many sports.
It seems absurd to say there's no correlation between race and
athletic ability.

Jonathan Marks

The way the question is phrased really embodies the key
issue of scientific discourse: What's the relationship between
a body of data and the conclusions one can draw from the
data? I think we have to start off first by asking exactly
what do we mean by athleticism. Because obviously a lot
of diverse characteristics go into that - strength, flexibility,
coordination, eyesight, endurance, just to name a few. But,
obviously, very different kinds of talents are required
in athletes. I happen to have seen a lot of white guys who
jump quite well. They're all in ballet, not in basketball.
But, one of the questions is what kinds of commonsense ideas
are inflecting the way that the question is being asked.
As opposed to a rigorous approach to it.

If we take the sort of commonsense idea that black people
are faster than white people, what does that actually mean
in a rigorous test? Does it mean that all blacks are faster
than all whites? Well, that's demonstrably false. Does it
mean a hypothetical average black person is faster than
a hypothetical black person? Well, that's meaningless because
I don't know how you'd find the hypothetical average person.
Does it mean the ten fastest black people are faster than
the ten fastest black people? This is, I think, close to
what people mean when they say something like that. But
the problem with that, is it's statistically nonsensical
to characterize a group of a couple of billion people by
its most extreme members.

What we're looking at here in the best athletes is essentially
occupational overrepresentation. There are a lot of reasons
why people are attracted to sports as a vocation. For example,
in boxing, there's an overrepresentation of blacks. There's
also an overrepresentation of Hispanics in boxing. It's
a consequence of the opportunities open to the particular
group in question. And where most avenues to upward mobility
are closed to you, you're going to gravitate to something
that seems just as low a probability of success as anything
else. If other venues are open to you, that don't involve
getting beaten up on a regular basis, you're probably more
likely to take those.

When we look at the general issue of occupational overrepresentation,
as evidence of genetic superiority, we're kind of left with
the promise of Irish policeman yielding Irish police genes,
and Jewish comedians being the result of Jewish comedy genes,
and Chinese laundry genes, which, of course, is ridiculous.
The point of all this is that there are a lot of reasons
why people are attracted to certain professions and certain
occupations and certain things to do with their lives. Only
one of which is that they have some sort of natural ability
for it.

Another important point is that while we like to talk about
ability, we have no real way of measuring it. It's a metaphysical,
abstract quality. Ability is something you're born with
that is independent of the development you will incur during
your life. But the fact is, the only thing that we can measure
is what you actually do, how you actually perform. The score
you get on a pencil and paper test, or whether you actually
shoot ten freethrows in a row. And that is not independent
of the life history that you have. Any IQ test, for example,
has a vocabulary component. And there's no way that you
can talk about vocabulary that is independent of the words
you've been exposed to during the course of your life!

Alan Goodman

I'd love to do a count of, for instance, the proportion
of Norwegians that won medals in the winter Olympics versus
people from the Congo. Or even the number of Finns that
have won middle distance races compared to the population
size of Finns. My guess is, if we were focused on looking
at, say, Scandinavian excellence in athletics, you could
come up with the same set of questions being asked. What
is it genetically about people in those cold countries and
that Norwegian success in the winter Olympics? Well, gosh,
maybe it's because they have a lot of snow up there or something
like that.